Parklife

The eye lands on the muzzles first: two greyhounds caught mid-stride, the black dog in front with a wire cage strapped over its snout and the number four on its dark jacket, the fawn-coloured dog beside it in a blue vest, jaws parted, legs flung out in a blur of sand and motion. Behind them the track dissolves into a hazy gold light, soft and warm, the only sharp things being the straining animals and, dropped into the bottom-right corner, the band's name in fat yellow lowercase letters with PARKLIFE in white italics beneath. There is no sign of the four men who made the record. That absence is the whole joke.

The photograph was never meant for a record sleeve. Sports photographer Bob Thomas shot it at Romford Stadium in Essex on 2 November 1988, a working night at the dogs, and it sat in a sports picture library until the designers at Stylorouge went hunting for exactly this kind of image. They cropped it down to the two lead dogs and the streaking ground. Rob O'Connor, Creative Director on the project, recalled that Thomas couldn't believe they wanted his greyhound picture for an album cover, and that he'd have asked for more money had he known where it was headed.

The idea grew out of a walk. Damon Albarn drifted past a William Hill bookmakers on the King's Road in Chelsea, and the betting-shop window lodged itself in his head. An early version of the cover tried to recreate that whole window, packed with the printed odds of various sports, before the designers narrowed everything down to a single arrested moment of racing. The band even bought shares in a real greyhound, so the dogs weren't only a visual gag.

What Stylorouge were doing was deliberate theft of tone. They described their method as misappropriating advertising imagery from one field to package and market music, thinking of Blur as a product, ironically, the way a betting slip or a cigarette packet is a product. A greyhound track photo carries the texture of a particular England: working-class leisure, flutters, floodlit Saturdays. Pinning the band's logo onto it sold the music as that same England, slightly tongue-in-cheek, slightly affectionate.

The irony deepens when you learn the cover almost wasn't about Romford at all. Most of the pictures inside the CD booklet show the band at the greyhound racing at Walthamstow Stadium, the obvious place you'd assume the sleeve came from. But the front image was shot somewhere else entirely, six years earlier, by a man photographing sport rather than pop stars. The dogs on the cover have nothing to do with Blur, and everything to do with what Blur wanted to mean.

The gamble paid off in a way no betting shop would price. Parklife, the third studio album by Blur, arrived on 25 April 1994 through Food Records and went straight to number one on the UK Albums Chart. It lodged there for 90 weeks, sold over a million copies in Britain, became the band's bestselling studio album, and helped fix the shape of the emerging Britpop sound that would dominate the rest of the decade.

Stylorouge designed the sleeves for all of Blur's first four albums, but this is the one that escaped the music shelves entirely. In 2010 the Royal Mail chose ten classic album covers by English artists for a set of postage stamps, and the racing greyhounds were among them. A working photograph from a night at the dogs in Essex, cropped, captioned with a yellow logo, and sent out across the country on the corner of envelopes. The dogs are still running, and nobody ever told them they'd crossed the wrong kind of finish line.